When I first became a trainer, my kids were little, and I confess that I often used stories about them to illustrate the points I was teaching. Sometimes I even attached my children’s names to cute stories I read. I’m not necessarily proud of that, but those weren’t the worst lies I told in my life. I read this story and used it to start a conversation about the differing measures of customer service at an airline.

So to be clear, I don’t remember who the child in question is but it definitely is NOT any of my children. (Yes, really.) The story was told by a new parent.

“We raised our children to be independent from an early age. ‘Teach them to do things on their own; that’ll make our life easier.’ When our daughter was not yet two, she constantly asked for a glass of water. It was a little annoying, actually. So we said “Honey, you can do that yourself. Come into the bathroom. Pull out the vanity stool, turn on the cold water – that’s this faucet. Take a paper cup from the holder. Pour yourself water and turn off the faucet. Drink the water and throw the cup in the waste basket.

Our daughter is smart as a whip. She got it right away. We kept asking her to get herself a cup of water and she did bringing the cup out. We were so proud.

We had some friends over and we had to show her off. ‘Honey, are you thirsty?’ She immediately ran and got some water. Our friends were quite impressed. We couldn’t leave it alone.

“Honey, I’m a little thirsty too. Would you get me a cup of water?’ We were winking ‘watch this’ and all the adults followed her quietly to the bathroom.

Honey reached up, got a cup, bent over and scooped water out of the toilet to bring to me.”

We were measuring results, but the process was clearly wrong.

I don’t know when I became aware of the difference between task and process focus, but that understanding informed a lot of my career leading change. In the anecdote above, the parent had a task focus, get the water, and measured the result. Results measures can sometimes be enough. If, for example, the water delivered was blue, and the family used Ty-D-Bowl, it might be a signal that something was wrong with the process.

Most of us grow up to be task focused. I don’t know about you but I am definitely addicted to To-Do lists. To-Do lists are the best tool for the task focused. It is all about the check-mark. I love the feeling of the check-mark so much that if I do something that isn’t on my list, I’ve been known to write it on the list just so I can check it off.

Now, some prefer the line through the task, rather than the check-mark, but my handwriting is bad enough that with the cross-out I might not be able to read the list at the end of the day and that is the best secondary rush, where you look back at all that you accomplished. Of course, the downside is if you have a Murphy’s Law Day, where everything that could go wrong did go wrong, then the check-mark system is more discouraging than the cross-out because you can actually read the whole list. However, if you are the kind of person who needs to do ABC priorities on your seven page To-Do list, readability is a boon.

Task focus isn’t bad. It’s just meant for one-off simple tasks, where “get-’er-done” is the measure. It’s better for individual work. If you are depending on someone else, and how the work is done is important, then maybe a process focus is better. In our story the parent “assumed” that Honey was following the process as instructed. That often doesn’t work. New parents and new managers learn not to make such assumptions.

Process focus, on the other hand, works for routine work, and more complex and interconnected work. The why and the how are most important; flow and procedure matter.

A process has inputs, activities, outputs. Inputs can be materials, labor, funding. Activities can be making something, or providing a service. Outputs may be a finished product, a happy customer, payment.

Processes are everywhere: make a pizza, check into a hotel, deposit money in a bank. These days, because computers do a lot of the activities in a process, we often miss the process steps. Even some of the scores of tasks on my Saturday morning To-Do list are really processes. How do I know that? Because of the three trips I made to Home Depot to hang a shelf above my workbench. Planning is a process and clearly should have been a part of the process to put up that darned shelf. (Later, I wrote plan and gather materials on the list before my check-mark.)

Whereas people tend to measure tasks by the output measure, completion, there are multiple opportunities to measure a process. To name a few there are:

• Input measures of quantity, quality, and timeliness
• Activity cycle time
• Adherence to procedures
• Errors, rework, scrap
• Output measures of quantity, quality, and timeliness

In fact, any place you see an arrow in this diagram is an opportunity for one or more metrics, including how process feedback is incorporated and adapted to.

Businesses think about process when something goes wrong. A new competitor shows up with new technology, and the company creates an environmental scanning process to link with strategic planning.  A near miss incident begets a safety evaluation process before going live.

Process by itself can become a problem. Procedure on top of procedure (bureaucracy) can erode customer focus, slow down cycle time, and raise costs to uneconomic levels. People in bureaucracies often focus on the wrong things, and miss important goals and then say my least favorite excuse, “It’s a process,” which means “I know I said I’d deliver ‘x’ by now and I didn’t even come close, and didn’t tell you, but I am learning a lot.”

Then it becomes necessary to change, and guess what, change is a process, Unfreeze-Change-Freeze as Kurt Lewin said in 1947, or Insight-Action-Results as I started saying in 2003, or

But if you treat change as a task, laying off people without removing the work, closing down functions or locations without evaluating what they are doing, changing a product without understanding the customer view, or changing a trading partner payment system without asking, you might find yourself making multiple trips to Home Depot, looking at blue water in a paper cup, or worse.